Collide-a-scape

There’s a fascinating, informative discussion thread on the dynamics of societal collapse over at The Oil Drum, prompted by a very readable 10,000 word essay on the fall of the Roman empire, cleverly entitled, “Peak Civilization.”

This is really complicated stuff that the news media utterly fails to convey, preferring instead to focus on single-cause “forcings,” be it drought, climate change, overpopulation, or overexploitation of natural resources. I’m susceptible to this myself with respect to drought.

Of course, the media takes its cue from scholars such as Jared Diamond, whose one-size-fits all thesis is pretty well deconstructed by Joseph Tainter. Fans of Tainter will be heartened to know that his work is intelligently discussed (as far as I can tell) at the aforementioned essay and comment thread on The Oil Drum.

So the battle is joined:

“The complaint has no merit at all,” Jared Diamond tells Science magazine in an exclusive interview published today, referring to the $10 million lawsuit filed against him and The New Yorker, for his April 2008 piece on a blood feud in Papua New Guinea.

The Science story is only available to subscribers, or those with online access, but the author, Michael Balter, has excerpts on his blog, including this quote from New Yorker editor David Remnick:

It appears that The New Yorker and Jared Diamond are the subject of an unfair and, frankly, mystifying barrage of accusations.

He’s talking to you, Rhonda Shearer, and to a lesser extent, you guys over at Savage Minds.  Time to double-down?

Hey, quite a spectacle over at Savage Minds, with a bunch of anthros, (apparent) journos and one sculptor/art historian-turned bloodhound ripping each other to shreds.

People, people, is that any way to run a truth squad?

The wolf-pack is tearing away at Jared Diamond. Opportunity knocks:

part of the reason…is to reclaim some of the ground among general readers lost to “experts” like Jared Diamond. With this series, StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org seek to capture that wider general audience for writings about anthropology.

If the first essay is any indication of what’s to come, good luck with that.

Anthropologists are fretting over the Jared Diamond fallout.

Dudes, you can’t have it both ways; you can’t engage the public (which is what many of you want) without risking that your work will be interpreted in ways that you never intended. Diamond is an easy straw man because he’s not a member of your club. (And, yeah, because he now might be in a heap of trouble.)

I also have a hard time believing that one writer could embody a whole field, which is what anthropologists seem to believe. If Diamond is the public face of anthropology, don’t blame him. Blame yourselves, blame your own field for not cultivating any cross-over scholars that know how to write for your flagship journals as well as for Harper’s or The New Yorker.

Historians don’t have this kind of problem (or defensive posture). Nor do political scientists or biologists.

So stop bitching about Diamond and start writing (especially if you have tenure) for larger audiences than a couple of dozen fellow scholars. Yes, a place like Savage Minds is a good start, but it’s still an insular world.  Take a look at Patty Limerick’s example if you want to see how it’s done. She’s a highly respected environmental historian who over the years has written regularly for newspapers, including a guest op-ed stint for the NY Times.

Calling all Savage Mind bloggers. I’m sure one of you can rise to the occasion.

Some months ago, Joseph Tainter published a withering essay entitled, “Collapse, Sustainability, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed.”

The title is a clever play off of Jared Diamond’s 2005 best-seller. Anyone interested in an overview of collapse literature and a counter-perspective to the current popularizing of the concept should read Tainter’s essay. As he writes at the outset,

There is a long history, within anthropology and other social sciences, of scholarly interest in the environmental dimensions of social life…In general the literature of this strand postulates that collapses result from shortages of resources, brought on by normal environmental variation, abrupt climate shifts, or human damage.

More recently, Tainter notes, contemporary scholars have fueled “discussions of our own sustainability and sustainable development,” which

postulate that ancient societies collapsed because they degraded their environments, justifying the concern that today’s socieites could collapse for the same reason.

A parable that many have latched on to is the case of Easter Island.  As demonstrated yesterday in this post by my colleague Tom Yulsman, scientists and science journalists join environmentalists in viewing Easter Island as a cautionary tale for our times.

The true “collapse” of Easter Island, however, is more complex than ecological degradation via over-exploitation. Even Wikipedia offers a more nuanced perspective than is commonly known:

A series of devastating events killed or removed almost the entire population of Easter Island in the 1860s. In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck Easter Island. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing or killing around 1500 men and women, about half of the island’s population. A dozen islanders managed to return from their slavery, but brought with them smallpox and started an epidemic, which reduced the island’s population to the point where some of the dead were not even buried. Contributing to the chaos were violent clan wars with the remaining people fighting over the newly available lands of the deceased, bringing further famine and death among the dwindling population.

Tainter discusses this history in his essay, as well as other complicating factors, such as the possible role of the Polynesian rat (introduced by islanders) on the decline of the Palm forest. (Tainter is not a lone critic, either. See here, for more on those rats.)

Diamond’s use of Easter Island and other case studies in “Collapse” strike Tainter as too convenient:

Jared Diamond is a man with a message. At least that was his intention. Collapse (2005) was meant to tell how anthropogenic environmental degradation doomed past societies and, on a grander scale, will undermine us if we don’t change.

That last point may well prove true, but trumpeting Easter Island as a cautionary lesson appears to rest on scientifically shaky ground.